As Recruiting Needs Change, Spokane County Washington Sheriff's Office Ends Cash Bonuses

Spokane County is trying something new to attract potential employees to the region's public safety system, while ending a yearslong effort that awarded tens of thousands to new hires.

The county commission voted unanimously Tuesday to do away with a program offering cash sign-on bonuses to new hires at the Spokane County Sheriff's Office. Instead, new hires who lack experience will not receive anything, while transfers from other policing agencies with at least two years of experience will receive a bank of leave time totaling 240 hours.

Spokane County commissioners also amended the bonus policy for new hires in the detention services department. The most noticeable change is to the bonus offered cooks, which jumped from $3,500 to $10,000 with Tuesday's vote. Corrections officers transferring from another public safety agency will continue to receive a $15,000 bonus, and entry level hires $10,000, but on a new schedule that breaks it up into three disbursements over the course of the hire's first year.

Detention Services Chief Don Hooper told the commissioners last month that the cook position is one of the hardest to fill in the department. They receive applicants, but only a fraction actually appear for an interview, and a smaller fraction move on and pass a background check, added Cameron Kurowski, a training and hiring sergeant for the department.

"The biggest hurdle for us is getting the right people to come in," Kurowski said. "It's a position that supervises inmates, and we want to make sure that we're bringing the right person in so that we can have a person that's trustworthy to be in that supervision of the inmates."

Detention Services has around 20 vacancies, and continuing the program will help keep Spokane County an attractive option statewide and nationally, Hooper said. The program has seen some success from when it began, reducing the number of vacancies by more than a dozen.

"We are going in the right direction, but it's two steps forward, one step back," Hooper said.

The sign-on bonuses started under former Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich in February 2021 amid what he and several law enforcement officials described as a challenging time to recruit for agencies nationwide. Detention Services followed suit later that year, as reported by The Spokesman-Review.

Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels said interest in the profession dropped dramatically following the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in 2020, and following new police reform measures passed by the Washington Legislature in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic only added to the recruiting challenges, he said.

"There's never one factor, right?" Nowels said. "I think the legislation was part of it. I think the anti-police rhetoric from 2020 through about 2023 really exacerbated it nationwide. You get people who are getting educated, or deciding what kind of career paths they are going to seek after high school, and, quite frankly, law enforcement wasn't popular."

Lateral transfers with experience received $25,000, while those new to the profession received $10,000, under the previous iteration of the bonus policy. That's up from $15,000 and $5,000 when the program first started.

Nowels said the move away from cash bonuses is due to a few factors, including the lack of any vacancies in his office. The office's recruiting needs are different, and the cash bonuses were paid through the salaries for the vacant positions, meaning there is no funding available for the bonuses now that the positions are filled.

"Over the last year and probably three or four months, we've hired maybe upward of 60 people, which is the most we've ever hired in one run," Nowels said.

Lateral hires who've joined the Sheriff's Office over the past few years were asked their opinion on the change, and the overwhelming majority said they would have preferred the leave balance to the cash bonus, Nowels said. Most of them are more established in life than a typical entry level hire, and shared the time would be more valuable to them.

"When you're new at an organization and you accrue one day of sick time a month, and then you get kids who are sick and home from school for two or three days in a row, you're now, all of a sudden, taking time off without pay, or you're trying to find or pay for child care," Nowels said. "If you have maybe 10 days of sick leave on the books to start, there's some flexibility there, right?"

Looking ahead, Nowels said he believes the agency's workforce development and mentorship will help with long-term retention of the recent hires. He said the environment has changed greatly from when he started at the agency in 1998 to today, namely in the sense that new hires are given much more hands-on training. When Nowels joined, "you had three months to show them you could do this job," he said.

"We can't afford to do that now," Nowels said. "If we believe somebody's got the capability of learning the job, it's no longer like, 'You got to show us in three months, or you're gone.' It's, 'You're going to go through the academy, you're going to get into the training car, and if we think that we can teach you and train you and get you to where you need to be, we're going to give you a lot longer than three months to do it.' "

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